You get an
ArgumentError:wrongnumberofarguments(1for0) error. The reason is the hash is converted to string keys upon serialization.

So I was thrilled when I did a bit of searching to see if anyone else had the same issue. Nope. Looked at the ActiveJob::Arguments module. Passing keyword arguments are not supported. I actually get to report a real feature request to Rails!

This this is where the magic began… within a few minutes Sean Griffin (@sgrif) picked up on the issue report. I went to lunch, planning to fork ActiveJob and start hacking away when I got back. But Sean beat me to it. Sean added the ability to pass keyword arguments to ActiveJob jobs, and even backported it to Rails 4.2.1.

UPDATE (Jan 9, 2015): I have not updated this project in year. While it may work, I doubt it. If you would like to take over the project, leave me a comment and we’ll get in touch.

I was reading Jason Seifer’s: Offline Gem Server Rdocs, which is an apache/passenger served Sinatra app that allows you to view the Rdocs of installed gems without using gem server. Nice. So I installed it on our sandbox server for all to enjoy.

But it got me thinking, there is another think I like to keep an eye on on our servers… log files. Oh, and I was looking for good excuse to play around with Sinatra. So, “with a one, and-a-two, and-a-three…” we have Sinatra-Tailer.

Requirements

I whipped this up pretty quickly so I’m sure there are a few bugs. There is some testing for a few unit tests, but nothing functional.

One word of warning, if you want to put this on a production server my recommendation is to put it on a separate port (like 9876) and for heaven’s sake, at a minimum use http basic authentication. From the sinatra readme:

Problem: Our Cub Scout den leader sends email reminders to all the parent about upcoming events. I decided to setup a gCal (google calendar) will all the events so that other parents could just check the calendar as they wish, or subscribe to the ical file to integrate with their own calendar. But several of the parents don’t have calendars (shame, shame) and everyone still liked the idea of receiving email reminders. So I decided to write a ruby script to email reminders automatically two days before the event.

Solution: Ruby is a great language to handle this. Especially since there are gems to handle many of the functions we need. Some of the gems we will be using are as follows: